Refusing the breathalyser in Türkiye costs more than a positive reading

The comparison is the whole of the decision. A first reading over 0.50 promille in a private car brings a 25,000 Turkish lira administrative fine and the licence withheld for six months (KTK 48, fifth paragraph). Not having the measurement taken at all brings 150,000 lira and the licence withheld for five years (KTK 48, ninth paragraph, in the form given to it on 12 February 2026).

Read the first two rows together and the design of the paragraph is plain. Refusal has been priced at the level of a third offender, so that declining the device is never the cheaper answer. Only the eighth paragraph is heavier, and it is heavier in kind rather than in figures: there the licence is cancelled rather than withheld.

The assumption behind a refusal is that without a number there is no case. That is not how the criminal provision is built. Article 179/3 of the Penal Code punishes driving while not in a condition to operate the vehicle safely — through alcohol, through a narcotic or stimulant substance, or for any other reason — with six months to two years' imprisonment. The offence is defined by unfitness, not by a threshold. A reading is evidence going to that question; so are the officer's observations, the manner of driving and the refusal record itself. A file can be opened without a reading, and the missing reading is not neutral inside it.

Where the sample is taken anyway

If anything happened on the road, the choice was never yours. Where a driver has been in an accident causing injury or death, or in a damage-only accident the police have attended, examination is compulsory: a driver who will not allow the device to be used is taken to a forensic medicine institution or a Ministry of Health facility, and blood, saliva or urine samples are taken (KTK 48, third paragraph). What that produces in an injury file is set out under traffic accidents causing injury.

Where drugs are suspected

The tenth paragraph turns the stop into something else. Where narcotic or stimulant use is suspected, the Code of Criminal Procedure provisions on judicial police apply to what follows — an investigative act, not a traffic check. And a positive result is on its face evidence of use: TCK 191 punishes possessing or using such substances for personal use with two to five years, and prosecution is deferred for five years under TCK 191/2. A supervision measure of at least one year runs inside that period, and the prosecutor may extend it in six-month steps by up to two further years (TCK 191/3). What that deferral commits a foreign national to is dealt with under narcotics offences and possession.

Most licences are lost not at the roadside but in the fortnight afterwards, while the driver watches the wrong file. The refusal sanction is administrative. It does not wait for a prosecutor, it does not need a conviction, and it becomes final on its own timetable. An application against it is made to the sulh ceza judge within fifteen days of notification; once that period passes, the decision stands (Law no. 5326, art. 27/1).

Paying does not cost you the challenge. A fine paid within its payment period is reduced by twenty-five per cent, and the Law states in terms that payment does not affect the right to challenge the decision (art. 17/6). The opposite mistake is the expensive one: a withheld licence is not returned until every administrative fine imposed under the Traffic Code has been collected (KTK 48, thirteenth paragraph), so an unpaid ticket from an unrelated stop can hold a licence long after the five years have run.

What a second refusal adds

The five-year window is counted backwards from the date of the last violation, not forward from the first, and a new period of withholding does not begin until any existing one ends (fifth paragraph). A second withdrawal within five years brings a driver-behaviour development programme run through the Ministry of Health, and a third brings a psycho-technical assessment and examination by a psychiatrist (eleventh paragraph). A driver who breaches the fifth or the ninth paragraph three times in five years while driving goods or passenger transport vehicles has the licence cancelled rather than withheld (added paragraph).

Who issues the sanction settles how it is attacked. Under the twelfth paragraph of article 48, as replaced on 12 February 2026, the temporary withdrawal and the cancellation of a licence under that article are carried out by the officials listed in article 6 of the Traffic Code. They are administrative acts, not court decisions, and the route against them is the one already described: an application to the sulh ceza judge within fifteen days. The general rule in KTK 112, which gives withdrawal and cancellation of licences to the sulh ceza courts, applies only outside the cases where those officials and the traffic registration units are authorised to act.

If the refusal is already written into a tutanak, the useful questions are narrow. What does the record say you did — declined the device, disputed a reading, or asked to be taken for a blood sample? Those are three different things, and the wording now decides which paragraph is applied to you. Was an interpreter present when it was read out? Where a suspect cannot express himself adequately in Turkish an interpreter is appointed and the essential points are interpreted, at the investigation stage as well as at trial (CMK 202). If you did not understand what you were signing, say so and have that fact recorded.

Two consequences fall outside the traffic file altogether. Judicial control in a criminal case may include a ban on leaving the country, an order not to drive and to surrender the licence against a receipt, and treatment directed at alcohol dependency (CMK 109/3). And where a foreign national is sentenced to imprisonment, the position is reported to the Ministry of the Interior for assessment in relation to deportation (TCK 59). If you were held after the stop rather than released with a ticket, begin with what happens in the first hours of custody.

The thresholds themselves, the criminal offence that sits above 1.00 promille and the way the two files run in parallel are set out on drink and drug driving in Türkiye. This page answers one question only: whether refusing helps. On the text as it stands, it does not.